LGR Oddware - The Iomega ZIP Drive Experience

Ooh. I’ve got an Iomega ZIP drive, still. Pretty cool thing.

Great reminder of why we don’t use parallel anymore.

I have still got one somewhere.

Tuve una de aquellas, recuerdo que la conectaba al puerto paralelo, pero me desanimó porque los discos eran muy delicados y solía perder mucha información.

......THE CLICK OF DEATH!!!.....

Now when I see a BMW on the road, I'll think of Zip Drives.

I had an external Zip drive in the early 2,000 and I was very happy with it.

lol I wanted a ZIP Drive so bad back in the day since I thought it was the future of storage and the devices / disks just looked so cool everytime we hit Frys or CompUSA

I had an internal one on an HP computer. Bridged a gap before cd-r as you mentioned. Compared to classic floppy it felt like a massive leap forward.

Late to this one like usual but if this is odd, then I rolled with a rather eclectic crew because stuff like that was usual in my bunch during the 2000's for XP.

Imagine if they had kept upping the storage capacity of these with time. Imagine if the format was still in production and we had like 40TB storage capacity lol.

Is this drive compatible with 3.5 inch disks

My family did not have a lot of money growing up and the most money I ever saved up as a kid was around 80. In 1997, I landed a summer job with full-time hours. I landed my first two-week check of 370 after taxes. I bought this thing with that check and it was so much of a waste of money. My father was mad I spent my first real check on this thing.

I've got a ZIP 250 USB external and a ZIP 250 internal IDE, and several disks. All owned from new. Still work although obviously not amazingly useful these days.

i know i am super late to the party, but i still use one with my gaming pc, (i can dualboot DOS with windows 10), these are nice, my 250mb is used for storing files for doom

"Master and Slave"somethings and mindsets never change

I occasionally have to get data off Zip disks (as well as Jaz media) for work in 2024. It's that kind of industry.

Heh, meanwhile I had a 20 MB hard drive in the 90s and literally mountains of floppies I wished I could put on a hard drive. ZIP was just an expensive and slow lateral move from where I was!

Love the BMW lookin keys on the box 😀😀😀😀😀. Talk about creating a goid product image target.

What was the significance of the Iomega Zip drive when it was first introduced in 1994?

We used these for printing jobs with machine printers what a saver they were

These discs was awesome back in the day you could put so much on them

I had a SCSI Zip 100 drive for my Mac Performa in the mid 90s and I really liked it. Just recently bought a new old stock SCSI/Parallel Zip 100 which I plan on using with my Performa 6320CD that I got on eBay recently.

Never used one but I remember how excited people were when this came out.

I would have loved to have had this back in the late-1990s, would have been very useful for backing up my Kidpix art.

I’ve been watching LGR for years but it’s so strange seeing so many videos in his back catalogue from so far back. I was just fresh out of high school when he posted this video and I really haven’t done much since besides live however I can and exist.

Holy Shinto, that's a pretty good Jon St. John impression!

I worked in advertising back in the day in the early 2000s, Zip Discs really were the only way at the time to get artwork for ads for the newspaper from our office to the printers, which they would come pick up directly from our agency. They were really good.

Late to the party to comment, but back in the mid-late 90's advertising world, we used Zip disks to move big graphics and animation source files between designers (and sometimes to customers).

I never had something to with zipdrives.

At the time, ZIP and similar drives were incredibly important for saving large amounts of scientific data.

The plastic body looks like Motorola surfboard modem from same time period(just upgraded my internet recently lol). Wonder if some common manufacturer thread.

My aunt had one of these and I remember spending a lot of time messing with it. Like running games off of it and just being so impressed over floppy.

Bought a 2024 BMW Generic Sports Car and can confirm, starts via ZipDisc

We sold these discs for $20 each at Kinkos. In 2001. People paid it... So odd

Loved my ZIP drive in the day. Even after I got my first CD writer. ZIP discs were so much more convenient than cd's. De advent of USB sticks did finally end my use of it though. I do still own my SCSI ZIP drive but I haven't used it for about 20 years.

Because it ran like a hard drive it could get or give files with drag and drip. Very good product for the time. I had an external but internal was the fastest and better to work with.

I loved the Zip Disks. For the time that was great. I used the Zip 100, the Zip 250, and the Zop 750. All bay mounted. The 250 and 750 were backward compatible to lower capacity disks but at the time I would have all 3 drives working at once to write to or read from. I loved the fact it showed up in Windows as a disk drive and was fast for its day. The 750 disks were a little slow for the time but made good large space file storage and backup very well. I do recall the 750 drive not liking the lower capacity Zip disks and would just abort operations frequently. They worked for what I needed at the time.

These were a life saver for a 90s graphic designer. For the capacity, relative speed, data integrity and, reliability over floppies cannot be overstated. And CDs weren't an option - CD burners were barley coming on the scene, expensive, and drives were hit and miss on read speed and reliability. Our cdrom drive was 1.5x with a caddy system that successfully read about a quarter of the time. And when it did work it took over a minute to start reading data. Zips were a godsend. In fact many folks we knew had zip drives before CD drives.

When ejecting, these things would shoot out the disk out like a dart gun. We put it on the top shelf of our computer cabinet and the first time we tried it out, the disk smacked my Mom straight in the forehead! It was hilarious.

I'm an archivist for a museum, and I've got to digitize some zip disks 😅 your video is super helpful and informative, thank you 6 years on 🙇

Like video done on backup tapes that right at one point they switched from floppy disk to mini size vhs style tapes like review on them. They were shown in star trek 6 as recorded data tapes.

Wouldn't be 90's computering without zipdiscs. I always loved the purple face of the zip drive in my parents old Gateway.

The SCSI version could save large files without tying up the system like the parallel and IDE versions. We LOVED Zip drives. From Bernoulli 40, to Syquest 80, MOs…and finally Zip. Never gave us trouble, no click o death

Scrap every drive i had 10 drives (50 disks) they are totally worthless becuase of constant CLICK OF DEATH!!!!!
TOOK THEM ALL OUT BACK & LIT EM UP TO POLLUTE THE AIRE!!

GARBAGE, TRASH, JUNK!!! I wouldnt own one of these things no more, THE DRIVE OR ZIP DISK, TOTAL JUNK!!!

I remember the zip drive, had a friend who bought one.

I used an ide version around 97/98. It was very short lived but quite useful before thumb drives and cd-r became mainstream.